EA acquires talent, tech from GameFly's cloud gaming service

Electronic Arts announced its acquisition of the cloud gaming technology assets and personnel of GameFly today.

This will likely open up more possibilities for the company to expand its reach of games through streaming to more players on more devices.

The acquisition makes sense for EA, considering GameFly launched a game streaming service back in 2015 through Amazon's Fire TV streaming box which featured a console-like controller with gamepad.

The service consisted of packages of games organized by genre, and offered unlimited access to seven titles for a monthly fee.

Before that however, GameFly acquired the Israel-based streaming startup Playcast Media in 2009, where the company launched a pilot program with Israeli cable networks to stream games directly to users' television sets.

According to a press release announcing the deal, GameFly will join EA’s functional teams, including the central technology organization that is responsible for developing and operating the platform that powers EA’s games and services.